We’re here, we’re friends
Almost were lovers, back then
The politics, will never end
We said bye before we began

Saving faces, ego’s strong,
History deep, his-story’s long
Our unintended story could compose a song
Then write an album; and go on and on
Pride is passion, yours is power
Defences got weak, by love- devoured
You frequent my thoughts, several times an hour
Feelings= Confusion, explains ours.

Director says he has cracked the structure of Yann Martel’s allegorical novel about a boy adrift at sea with a tiger

It has been stuck in development hell for much of the past decade, but the big-screen version of Yann Martel’s 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel Life of Pi finally looks set to go into production after the Oscar-winning film-maker Ang Lee confirmed it will be his next film.

Martel’s acclaimed novel chronicles the travails of a shipwrecked teenage boy stuck on a life raft with only a female orangutan, injured zebra, hungry hyena and brooding Bengal tiger for company. In recent years the likes of M Night Shyamalan, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Alfonso Cuarón have all been attached at one time or another to the project, but none has managed to get a movie into production.

Lee told the Digital Spy website his version was still at the scripting stage and he had not yet begun to think about casting.

“I’m delivering the first draft,” he said. “I think I’ve cracked the structure of the movie and I’ll figure out how to do it later.

“How exactly I’m going to do it, I don’t know … A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It’s a hard one to crack!”

Lee said the film would most likely be out in two years’ time. The Taiwan-born director’s next movie in UK cinemas will be Taking Woodstock, his comedy-drama about the 1969 music festival, which premiered in May to lukewarm reviews at Cannes. It screens at the London film festival today and opens nationwide on 13 November.

George Clooney’s wily Mr Fox outwits the bad British farmers in Wes Anderson’s entertaining animated version of the Roald Dahl classic, says Philip French

The precision, brevity and clarity of Roald Dahl‘s literary style probably derived from the way you learn to give orders, keep logs, write situation reports and contribute to debriefings as an officer in the armed forces. His realism, lack of sentimentality, distrust of the adult world and streak of cruelty came from experiencing childhood, the class system and public schools from an alien perspective (a boy of Norwegian parents observing British institutions), followed by Second World War service as an RAF fighter pilot and subsequent intelligence work in Washington.

Apart from an awareness of his varied audiences, there isn’t a great deal of difference between Dahl’s writing for adult and juvenile readers, and one of the chief challenges in adapting his stories is opening them up. He was a perfect source for Alfred Hitchcock’s 25-minute TV mysteries. Indeed, one of his stories, “Man From the South”, was used twice by Hitchcock, and again by Quentin Tarantino for his macabre contribution to the 1995 portmanteau film Four Rooms.

But his first work to reach the big screen, “Beware of the Dog”, his classic wartime tale with a brilliant twist in the tail, was a four-page story expanded into the two-hour film 36 Hours. Equally, Fantastic Mr Fox, his 1970 children’s story, provides Wes Anderson and his co-screenwriter, Noah Baumbach, with the central characters and the narrative core for their highly diverting stop-motion animation film.

Dahl’s fable touches on issues of intensive agriculture and ethology, which were very much in the air at the time it appeared. The wily Mr Fox, who lives a natural life, loses his tail to the loathsome trio of exploitative agribusiness farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. (The symbolic castration inevitably evokes the tail lost by Squirrel Nutkin to Old Brown the owl in the Beatrix Potter story.) The vicious trio then lay siege to Fox and his family, driving them further underground until Fox unites his threatened fellow creatures. Together, they penetrate the three farms from underground and live off the poultry, meat and vintage cider they steal while the dumb farmers sit waiting above.

In such films as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson has shown a fascination with sibling rivalry, eccentric matriarchs and dysfunctional families uniting against the outside world and he introduces these themes into a more complicated, and sentimentalised version of Fox’s life. Like many a western gunfighter or gangster, the cool, suave Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is persuaded by his wife (Meryl Streep, Hollywood’s voice of balance and maturity) to give up a life of rapine for a more settled existence. So he becomes a journalist, moves from his underground lair to live in a tree sold to him by a local estate agent, inevitably a weasel (Wes Anderson himself).

Inevitably, bourgeois conformity goes against Fox’s nature and, like the super-crook Danny Ocean in the series of heist movies Clooney made with Steven Soderbergh, he recruits a dim possum for a few final raids on Boggis, Bunce and Bean, which result in the siege Dahl so admirably creates. Meanwhile, Fox’s adolescent son, Ash, has to compete with his visiting cousin, Kristofferson, a karate ace and all-round athlete who can dive from a tree into a barrel of water without causing a splash. The Anglo-American or mid-Atlantic setting is amusingly sustained by having the two cousins attend the local high school where they’re coached by Anderson regular Owen Wilson in “whackbat”, a bizarre cross between cricket and baseball.

When the film escalates into hectic action, it draws on Hollywood genres, westerns in the Sergio Leone mode and crime movies; the treacherous Rat (Willem Dafoe) has a redemptive death scene, a parody of a classic gangster film that happily produces laughter rather than tugging at heart strings.

In a tradition that has been going on since the 1950s, when the brutal Romans in Ben-Hur were played by British actors and the gentle Jews by Americans, the animals in Mr Fox are voiced by Americans and the oppressive humans by Englishmen. Bean, the most detestable farmer, is played by Michael Gambon using his menacing gangster accent from The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover and Layer Cake.

But if the movie is Americanised, even to the extent of Mr Fox making his entry to the “Davy Crockett” theme from the 1950s Disney TV series, a significant contribution to the film’s beguilingly stylised graphic quality comes from British artists. The puppets are created by the team of MacKinnon and Saunders and the exceptional photography is the work of Tristan Oliver, who collaborated with Nick Park on most of Aardman’s stop-motion pictures, including Chicken Run, a film that compares favourably with Mr Fox.

In 1967, Roald Dahl scripted the fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, which opens with a disturbing comic scene of an American space capsule being swallowed in orbit by Ernst Blofeld’s giant spacecraft that opens up at the front like a shark’s jaws. This is a black joke about the food chain and the survival of the fittest and his Mr Fox is part of this process. Anderson adds a coda to Fantastic Mr Fox that softens and domesticates Dahl’s ending. He removes Fox from his natural world red in tooth and claw and makes him an urban creature targeting supermarkets.

In the 1970s, Stuart Hample was a struggling cartoonist. Then he hit on the idea of turning the angst-ridden life of his favourite standup comedian, Woody Allen, into a comic strip

In the early 1960s, I saw Woody Allen perform, sometimes for no pay, at comedy clubs in Greenwich Village – the Bitter End, Upstairs at the Duplex – on occasion falling flat. There was the night he got no laughs. Working for no money, or maybe 50 bucks, and not a single laugh. None (except from me at the rear of the room). The material, of course, was singularly original, luminously funny.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, Woody was despondent. His manager, Jack Rollins, lit up a cigar and said: “What went wrong, Wood?” “The audience was hostile,” Woody said. Rollins exhaled thoughtfully. “An audience has to like you, to connect with you emotionally before they’ll laugh at your jokes. They sensed that you were fighting them.” He bit off a speck of cigar leaf and continued: “Could you come out and do your act, just for yourself, regardless of whether you get laughs or not?” Woody wasn’t sure. Jack urged him to try it for at least 20 performances.

Fast forward to 1975, a pretty good year. President Nixon was gone. The US pulled out of Vietnam. Charlie Chaplin was knighted. I sold a comic strip called Rich and Famous. But Rich and Famous failed to make me either of those things. I turned out the strip at night; by day, I ground out TV commercials for a cigarette brand furtively peddling cancer. My dream was to find another way of putting food on the table.

I had a lightbulb epiphany. It occurred to me that Woody might make a terrific comic strip. But how would he – 39 and by now wildly successful – react? I ran a test scene in my head. Me: ”Woody, I have an idea for a comic strip based on you. Possible?” Woody: “Sorry. Up to my neck writing a movie, editing another movie. Writing a piece for the New Yorker. Don’t need the money. Try me next year.”

So I asked him in person. Woody was intrigued enough to say: “Show me some sketches.” I based my drawings on how he looked in his late 20s, when we’d first met. He OK’d the Woody cartoon character (he even had it animated for a sequence in Annie Hall) and said: “What about the jokes?” I brought jokes. He looked through them. “Maybe,” he said, “I could help you with the jokes.”

Assuming he was offering to write them, I wanted to shout: “My saviour!” Instead, I said: “OK.” Which was more appropriate, since his help turned out to be dozens of pages of jokes from his standup years. Some were mere shards, such as “tied me to Jewish star – uncomfortable crucifixion”. Others were even more minimal: “bull fighting”, “astrology” (Woody occasionally translated these hieroglyphs).

Angst-ridden, flawed and fearful

But there were longer notations: “Sketch – man breaking up with female ape after his evolution.” And there were little playlets: “Freud could not order blintzes. He was ashamed to say the word. He’d go into an appetiser store and say, ‘Let me have some of those crepes with cheese in the middle.’ And the grocer would say, ‘Do you mean blintzes, Herr Professor?’ And Freud would turn all red and run out through the streets of Vienna, his cape flying. Furious, he founded psychoanalysis and made sure it wouldn’t work.”

A newspaper syndicate agreed to publish the feature. They requested six weeks of sample strips. I went each Saturday to Woody’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, where he judged the material and offered suggestions on how to develop characters and pace gags, and pleaded with me to maintain high standards. On 4 October 1976, the strip was launched. Woody, the pen-and-ink protagonist, was angst-ridden, flawed, fearful, insecure, inadequate, pessimistic, urban, single, lustful, rejected by women. He was cowed by mechanical objects, and a touch misanthropic. He was also at odds with his antagonistic parents; committed his existential panic to a journal; had regular sessions with his passive-aggressive psychotherapist; was threatened by large, often armed, men; and employed his modest size to communicate physical impotence the way Chaplin, in the guise of the Little Tramp, suffered humiliation.

I often wondered why Woody gave the concept a green light. In 1977, he related the following anecdote. He had cast the actress Mary Beth Hurt in his movie Interiors. Hurt regularly phoned her mother in Iowa to reassure her that she was safe and happy. During one of those calls, she proudly announced that she was going to play Diane Keaton’s sister in a movie “by somebody you probably haven’t heard of, a director named Woody Allen”. “I know about him,” said her mother, “he’s in the funny pages.” Woody’s manager figured it was no bad thing if his image was disseminated daily out in the heartland.

I took on a handful of writers. The star was David Weinberger, a brilliant 26-year-old PhD student in philosophy, who submitted some jokes out of the blue and won instant praise from Woody. Like all new strips, we lost a few newspapers along the way. The folks at the syndicate became nervous. I started receiving notes of caution: go easy on God references so we don’t offend Bible Belt readers; don’t do gags with Woody in nightclubs – they compare unfavourably with his live performances; change the name of your character Death to Fate. (Woody said: “Better to call him Death. A character named Death can be quite funny. You have to take some chances. It’ll be more alive if you use Death. Besides, you don’t want just another strip that succeeds, do you?”)

Woody always envisaged I’d give him a wisecracking, zeitgeisty cartoon that would deal with relationships, politics, social commentary. He wanted his strip to be amusing but also intelligent. But the anxious syndicate honchos demanded more gags and subjects accessible to the largest possible readership. Woody’s response was that an artist has to follow his own intuition, rather than obey some huckster driven by readership surveys.

This is borne out by my notes from a meeting with Woody, during which he said: “We will gain more than we will lose by establishing an identity; my tendency would be to risk being more offensive. I always believe that if I love a thing, 90% of the time there will be some people out there who also like it.”

Woody’s scribblings to me on the strips I sent for his approval offered suggestions: “The key is developing people. They must have desires – goals – so we are interested in them. I still feel you must be daring. The strip can probably exist on the level of ‘cute’ little jokes each day, but if you really want to involve the readers, it needs more substance – more plot.”

Another Woody reminder: “We need more strips I’m not in. My folks. My lovers.” And another: “We must not just use jokes that exploit my image – jokes should have genuine insights. Don’t pander. Don’t be afraid to be far out. Lead your audience; don’t look to them to lead you.”

And: “Need more character engagement – instead of jokes being free-floating, they must be jokes on the way to character development. Jokes are like the decorations on the Christmas tree – but it’s a beautiful tree you need to start with. Only then can you hang baubles on it. (Sorry for the disgusting metaphor.)

“Please don’t make me so masochistic. I’m not in life. Trying and failing is funny. Masochism is not.”

Meanwhile, the executives continued to fire off cautionary messages: aim at the broad base; the strip is too philosophical; let’s not have such an emphasis on therapy jokes. When the director of sales told me we had lost a paper in California because the editor felt the strip dealt too much with rejection, disappointment, and sometimes even God, Woody said: “I take that as a compliment. What’s the worst thing that can happen? So they’ll cancel the strip.”

Off to the therapist with Woody

Equilibrium returned periodically, courtesy of Woody’s steadfast sense of irony. One Saturday, he said: “I’m getting a ride to my therapist’s. If you want to come along, I’ll have my guy take you home.” We climbed into a waiting car. I noticed the ubiquitous floppy fedora he wore to conceal his identity, resting on the armrest. After a 10-minute drive, the car rolled down Fifth Avenue to a sleek apartment building and pulled to a stop. The sidewalk was empty. Woody sat unmoving, chatting amiably. But then, when a gaggle of pedestrians appeared, he jammed the protective hat on his head and dashed into the building.

A few days later, I drew this sequence in a strip. In the last drawing, Woody lies on the couch, having escaped the crowds, and complains to his therapist: “I’m so lonely. Nobody talks to me.” When Woody came upon it, he simply said: “Very perceptive.”

Working with Woody was smooth sailing: he was modest, efficient, dependable, focused, loyal, generous, incisive, serious, and witty. But quietly so. Even when an archetypal Allen quip slips out, there are no eye-rolls, no grandstanding, no bada-boom. He doesn’t hang out with comics, he doesn’t seek the limelight at awards shows, he doesn’t demand his name above the title. He also has incredibly clean hands.

Woody’s DNA is here and there in the strip, but he did not write it. If he had, it probably would have had a smaller audience – but it would have been a hell of a lot funnier.

This is an edited extract from Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip, published by Abrams on 2 November at £19.99. To order a copy for £18.99 (free UK p&p), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

The screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 morality tale has sparked a debate about the merits of frightening our children

When Jess Hyde picked a copy of Where the Wild Things Are from the bedroom shelf last week, her seven-year-old son, Arthur, pointed to it and said: “That gives me nightmares.”

“He had never mentioned it before,” says the mother of three from Frome, Somerset. “But it is a tricky one because the monsters are quite scary. They are not friendly pictures. It is something about the colour – they are brown and grey and not very endearing.” Arthur’s mother, who was given the book by friends, asked her son if he wanted her to read it. “He still said yes,” she laughs.

The spooky palm tree fronds and twisting vines that invade the bedroom of naughty Max in this nursery classic will soon be invading the imaginations of young children anew, as a film version of Maurice Sendak’s book heads for the cinema. A modern morality tale, Sendak’s story sees little Max reject his parental home for a world where he can become “king of all wild things”. It has been brought to the screen this autumn by director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers, who adapted the screenplay. Their film has won plaudits from many critics, but some parents have been troubled by the ferocity of the story, and by the power of Jonze’s new interpretation. As a result, they are advising other families to stay away.

The protest, or “wild rumpus” to borrow a phrase from the book, that has greeted the release of the film echoes disquiet about the bleak message embedded in Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release. Entitled Up, it has been viewed by many parents as anything but.

A handful of American educationalists, including Professor Holly Willett, of Rowan University in New Jersey, have rushed to defend Sendak’s 1963 book, but the new film stands accused of presenting unsettling images that, although popular, are likely to breed nightmares. A public debate about whether or not a child’s appetite for being frightened should be indulged is now in full swing.

“This is a classic hero’s story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person,” Willett, an expert on children’s literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak’s original tale has certainly stood the test of time: it is a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1983 composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.

“I remember reading the Sendak book to my children and it frightened the pyjamas off them,” Roger McGough, the poet, said this weekend. “But they went back to it. It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily.”

McGough has had similar problems with his own children’s poem, The Lesson, in which a teacher inflicts cartoon-style violence on his pupils. “I was a teacher myself when I wrote it and it was a joke, but some parents now consider it inappropriate and I can see that contexts change,” said McGough. But he points out that children’s stories, from Snow White onwards, have always contained danger and death. “It is just part of the landscape. Although I don’t think a writer should set out to scare children.”

The traditional fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are packed with disturbing twists, while the appeal of Roald Dahl’s work is inseparable from the dark side of his imagination. Dahl’s story The Fantastic Mr Fox is the subject of another film adaptation by a cult American director this autumn. Wes Anderson’s film opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday and is full of nature “red in tooth and claw”. Like Dahl’s book, it tells of a family of foxes besieged by evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are armed with guns, industrial diggers and explosives. Anderson has defended the “adult content” in his film by saying that children in his audience should be able to ask their parents about their worries as part of their learning process.

Willett argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about”, and so does not shy away from dark material.

Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where the Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealised version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way – a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.

In defence of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.

“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognise those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity”.

The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at their mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns,” he writes. “He manages none the less to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”

Other British psychologists agree that being scared need not be harmful to children, as long as the story ends well. Ruth Coppard, a child psychologist working in the NHS, says all cultures invent narratives that scare children a little and then comfort them. “My parents used to jiggle a baby up and down, then drop it a bit,” she says. “There is that pleasurable fear: you are safe but not safe. And that seems to exist in most cultures. It is the reinforcement of the safety.”

Although Where the Wild Things Are may be unsettling for children, Coppard points out that its boy hero returns to security and love. “Max goes back to where someone loves him.” The fact that his dinner is still hot is key, she adds, because it proves that his mother still loves him despite the fact he ran away.

“My kids loved the book when they were small,” says Coppard, who runs the website Help Me, Help my Child.

Yet the doubts surrounding the value of scary books and films remain of concern in the Hyde household. In addition to Arthur, Jess and her husband Tom have four-year-old George and Nancy, who is 15 months. Jess, who is a company director of Naturebotts, an online shop for eco-friendly baby products, is cautious about what her children are watching and reading.

“Some of their friends watch things like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, which I think are too grown-up for them,” says Jess, adding that she thinks it’s fine for children’s films to contain frightening elements as long as this is “within reason” and “suitable for their age and character”.

Paul Newman comes over as squeaky clean, almost, in a scrupulous new biography, says Vanessa Thorpe

Paul Newman was perfect. You could almost have called him the Queen Mother of Hollywood (but then people did sometimes say rude things about her late Majesty). Newman looked good and he had good ethics. Even his branded salad dressing tastes fairly good.

It is sad, then, to learn of the vice-ring connections, the arms-running, the addiction to Twinkie bars and, worst of all, the fact that he and Robert Redford nailed that poor actress to the handlebars for the famous bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No, not really. In fact, anyone looking for killer facts to tarnish the memory of Newman – Gawd bless him – will not find much ammunition in the pages of Shawn Levy’s nicely paced biography. The film star is revealed as an admirable, complex and energetic superstar, worthy of at least some of the adoration laid at his feet.

His comparative integrity in a business where fakery counts was rooted in his organised, moral upbringing in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and is evident in incidents like the time, as a young hopeful, he told the powerful movie mogul Sam Spiegel that he would not change his name to sound less Jewish.

Much of the worst that does emerge in this account of an idealised family man and philanthropist actually helps build up his macho image. He drove fast cars, for instance, competing at Le Mans, and he drank much too much beer and Scotch. (On one notorious evening he combined both passions – crashing, abusing the police and spending the night in a cell, prompting the headline: “Star of film rams hydrant and now nobody likes him”.)

On Newman’s intimate life, Levy gives it to us straight. When the 28-year-old actor first met Joanne Woodward, the actress he was with until the end, he was already married with children and regularly binged on beer. Woodward went on to be an understudy on his first successful Broadway show, Picnic, and the two became close, despite the fact that she initially thought him “funny, pretty” and too “neat”. A good friend of the couple tells Levy that the next few years were “more of an ordeal than a courtship” as they skirted around their obvious growing attraction.

In later life, Newman admitted to an endless sense of guilt about the break-up of his first marriage. He regretted, too, what he called the “generally boorish” behaviour of his youth. When it comes to undeniable flaws, we learn that those mesmeric blue eyes were colour blind, preventing early hopes of becoming a navy pilot, and that the actor couldn’t dance either. “Go look in my wife’s closet and check her shoes,” he once protested to film-makers.

The actor might also, perhaps, stand accused of being a little prissy. When filming Butch Cassidy with Robert Redford, he had his new wife embroider a sampler for his tardy co-star which read: “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.”

From the early days, Newman earned an industry reputation for fussiness on set. He was not strictly a Method actor, but he was a keen intellectualiser. Levy quotes director Sam Mendes’s account of an elderly Newman’s attention to detail filming Road to Perdition. “He’ll talk about the placing of a full stop or a comma,” said Mendes, also remembering how he had to change the word “here” for “where” to please his star. Like Steve McQueen and Redford, Newman was also unpopular with some for looking down at the hokum of Hollywood.

In the truly dark corners of his story there are hints of further infidelity, in particular an affair that started on the set of Butch Cassidy and, much later, there is the devastating impact of the drug-induced death of his actor son, Scott. But Levy’s study shows him to have had less trouble than most in stepping between the real world of business and family and the heightened world up there on screen, where everything is more beautiful and more potent. Certainly, Newman had the otherworldly looks that suited him to a permanent place in “movie land”. As his mother said in a 1959 interview: “In a way, it was a shame to waste so much beauty on a boy.”

The screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 morality tale has sparked a debate about the merits of frightening our children

When Jess Hyde picked a copy of Where the Wild Things Are from the bedroom shelf last week, her seven-year-old son, Arthur, pointed to it and said: “That gives me nightmares.”

“He had never mentioned it before,” says the mother of three from Frome, Somerset. “But it is a tricky one because the monsters are quite scary. They are not friendly pictures. It is something about the colour – they are brown and grey and not very endearing.” Arthur’s mother, who was given the book by friends, asked her son if he wanted her to read it. “He still said yes,” she laughs.

The spooky palm tree fronds and twisting vines that invade the bedroom of naughty Max in this nursery classic will soon be invading the imaginations of young children anew, as a film version of Maurice Sendak’s book heads for the cinema. A modern morality tale, Sendak’s story sees little Max reject his parental home for a world where he can become “king of all wild things”. It has been brought to the screen this autumn by director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers, who adapted the screenplay. Their film has won plaudits from many critics, but some parents have been troubled by the ferocity of the story, and by the power of Jonze’s new interpretation. As a result, they are advising other families to stay away.

The protest, or “wild rumpus” to borrow a phrase from the book, that has greeted the release of the film echoes disquiet about the bleak message embedded in Disney/Pixar’s latest animated release. Entitled Up, it has been viewed by many parents as anything but.

A handful of American educationalists, including Professor Holly Willett, of Rowan University in New Jersey, have rushed to defend Sendak’s 1963 book, but the new film stands accused of presenting unsettling images that, although popular, are likely to breed nightmares. A public debate about whether or not a child’s appetite for being frightened should be indulged is now in full swing.

“This is a classic hero’s story in which the protagonist undertakes a journey and returns a wiser person,” Willett, an expert on children’s literature, has argued in the American press. And Sendak’s original tale has certainly stood the test of time: it is a reliable classic on the shelves of middle-class toddlers on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1983 composer Oliver Knussen turned it into a one-act opera that has joined the modern repertoire.

“I remember reading the Sendak book to my children and it frightened the pyjamas off them,” Roger McGough, the poet, said this weekend. “But they went back to it. It is a scariness that you can control and that ends happily.”

McGough has had similar problems with his own children’s poem, The Lesson, in which a teacher inflicts cartoon-style violence on his pupils. “I was a teacher myself when I wrote it and it was a joke, but some parents now consider it inappropriate and I can see that contexts change,” said McGough. But he points out that children’s stories, from Snow White onwards, have always contained danger and death. “It is just part of the landscape. Although I don’t think a writer should set out to scare children.”

The traditional fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are packed with disturbing twists, while the appeal of Roald Dahl’s work is inseparable from the dark side of his imagination. Dahl’s story The Fantastic Mr Fox is the subject of another film adaptation by a cult American director this autumn. Wes Anderson’s film opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday and is full of nature “red in tooth and claw”. Like Dahl’s book, it tells of a family of foxes besieged by evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean, who are armed with guns, industrial diggers and explosives. Anderson has defended the “adult content” in his film by saying that children in his audience should be able to ask their parents about their worries as part of their learning process.

Willett argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about”, and so does not shy away from dark material.

Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where the Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealised version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way – a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.

In defence of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.

“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognise those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity”.

The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at their mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns,” he writes. “He manages none the less to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”

Other British psychologists agree that being scared need not be harmful to children, as long as the story ends well. Ruth Coppard, a child psychologist working in the NHS, says all cultures invent narratives that scare children a little and then comfort them. “My parents used to jiggle a baby up and down, then drop it a bit,” she says. “There is that pleasurable fear: you are safe but not safe. And that seems to exist in most cultures. It is the reinforcement of the safety.”

Although Where the Wild Things Are may be unsettling for children, Coppard points out that its boy hero returns to security and love. “Max goes back to where someone loves him.” The fact that his dinner is still hot is key, she adds, because it proves that his mother still loves him despite the fact he ran away.

“My kids loved the book when they were small,” says Coppard, who runs the website Help Me, Help my Child.

Yet the doubts surrounding the value of scary books and films remain of concern in the Hyde household. In addition to Arthur, Jess and her husband Tom have four-year-old George and Nancy, who is 15 months. Jess, who is a company director of Naturebotts, an online shop for eco-friendly baby products, is cautious about what her children are watching and reading.

“Some of their friends watch things like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, which I think are too grown-up for them,” says Jess, adding that she thinks it’s fine for children’s films to contain frightening elements as long as this is “within reason” and “suitable for their age and character”.

The director of Alien and Gladiator has bought remake rights to the Channel 4 mini series and David Peace’s quartet of novels, and plans to relocate the action from Yorkshire to the US

Ridley Scott is planning to remake Channel 4′s Yorkshire crime trilogy Red Riding as a Hollywood movie.

Columbia Pictures has bought the remake rights to the TV series, and to the original quartet of novels by David Peace on which it was based.

Scott drove the deal after seeing the Red Riding trilogy and taking it to Oscar-winning screenwriter Steve Zaillian, with whom he previously collaborated on American Gangster and Hannibal.

Zaillian (Schindler’s List) will be responsible for translating Peace’s own distinctive brand of Tyke noir into an American setting. According to Andrew Eaton, the producer of the C4 series who will also co-produce the remake, the plan is to relocate the story from Yorkshire to a run-down industrial state such as Pennsylvania.

Peace’s novels are each titled by the year in which they take place – 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983. They mix fact and fiction, delving into child murders and police corruption against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, the Silver Jubilee and the political tensions of the early Thatcher years.

The C4 adaptation consists of three films by the same writer, Tony Grisoni, but different directors – 1974 by Julian Jarrold, 1980 by James Marsh and 1983 by Anand Tucker. The script for 1977 was written but not shot for budgetary reasons.

Although made for television broadcast in the UK, the trilogy is set for a cinema release in several countries, including the US, France and Germany.

The critical reception has been particularly strong in America. Film historian David Thomson caused a stir at the recent Telluride Film Festival by writing in the festival programme that Red Riding was “better than The Godfather”.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy described it as a “compelling, disturbing crime drama that leapfrogs through a decade’s worth of corruption and venality, leaving everyone in its vicinity permanently soiled or six feet under.”

Scott will produce the movie version through his own company, Scott Free, along with Zaillian’s Film Rites and Eaton’s Revolution Films.

Eaton still hopes one day to produce the unmade 1977 script. But the remake deal means he’s contractually forbidden to do so until two years after the release of the American movie.

Xan Brooks tracks the stars at the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox on the opening night of the 53rd London film festival

Xan Brooks meets the hand-crafted cast of Wes Anderson’s movie of the Roald Dahl classic, Fantastic Mr Fox, which opens the London film festival tonight